Saturday, 21 November 2009

Stupid, stupid, stupid

The City of Sydney is ripping up the road in Pyrmont and building a fancy bike path where it is not required. This particular stretch of road is one of the heaviest cycling routes in Sydney - bikes outnumber cars through here at least 10:1. In my opinion, this stretch does not need ripping up and modifying as there are so few cars using it, the risk of a bike/car crash are minimal. We have the road to ourselves.

I guess though the City Council put a certain amount of money aside for a bike path, so the engineers and planners had to work out how to spend it. That meant building a bike path where one is not needed, and not building them where they are needed as that would mean fiddling with budgets, arguing with accountants, lots of pointless meetings and mountains of paperwork. Much easier to tear up tarmac than to push paper.

Now, I have just told you that this is perhaps the heaviest cycling route in Sydney. So you'd expect there to be lots and lots and lots of bikes pouring through this stretch morning and evening. This stretch looks like Saigon at peak hour.

Given that there are hundreds of bikes traversing this route, if you were going to block the street and divert traffic, would you plan and make special arrangements for diverting bikes? Especially if you are building a frigging bike path? You'd at least expect signage directed specifically at cyclists, the majority users of this road.

We're talking about local government here. Of course they didn't. Bikes have not been considered at all. It's a clusterfuck from hell. The engineer in charge deserves to be boiled in tar.

If these idiots were working on a runway at the airport, they'd forget to tell the aircraft to land somewhere else.